NYT: Can Ultimate Frisbee Save The World?

That’s the headline of a New York Times opinion column this week that focuses on Ultimate Peace, the non-profit that brings together Israeli and Palestinian youths for ultimate camps in Israel.

Here’s a brief blurb from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s piece.

“Well, we’re not trying to bring peace to the Middle East,” said David Barkan, who volunteers as the chief executive of Ultimate Peace, which sponsored the camp. “That’s not the goal. It’s about changing a mind-set through the values of the sport that we know leads to peace between people.”

As I interviewed Mr. Barkan by phone last week, I felt the temptation to roll my eyes. As he described his hope of changing hearts and minds through Ultimate Frisbee, all I could think about were those incoming rockets, and the long tragic history of that endlessly conflicted region. I struggled to imagine how Frisbee — seriously, Frisbee? — might succeed where a half-century of diplomacy had failed.